OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Anti_Turing Test: Reduced Variables for Social Network Friends' Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2014
Year: 2014

A routine activity of social networks servers is to recommend candidate friends that one may know and stimulate addition of these people to one's contacts. An intriguing issue is how these recommendation lists are composed. This work investigates the main variables involved in the recommendation activity, in order to reproduce these lists including its time dependent characteristics. We propose relevant algorithms. Besides conventional approaches, such as friend_of_a_friend, two techniques of importance have not been emphasized in previous works: randomization and direct use of interestingness criteria. An automatic software tool to implement these techniques is proposed. Its architecture and implementation are discussed. After a preliminary analysis of actual data collected from social networks, the tool is used to simulate social network friends' recommendations.
Bringing Web Time Travel to MediaWiki: An Assessment of the Memento MediaWiki Extension
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2014
Year: 2014

We have implemented the Memento MediaWiki Extension Version 2.0, which brings the Memento Protocol to MediaWiki, used by Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. Test results show that the extension has a negligible impact on performance. Two 302 status code datetime negotiation patterns, as defined by Memento, have been examined for the extension: Pattern 1.1, which requires 2 requests, versus Pattern 2.1, which requires 3 requests. Our test results and mathematical review find that, contrary to intuition, Pattern 2.1 performs better than Pattern 1.1 due to idiosyncrasies in MediaWiki. In addition to implementing Memento, Version 2.0 allows administrators to choose the optional 200-style datetime negotiation Pattern 1.2 instead of Pattern 2.1. It also permits administrators the ability to have the Memento MediaWiki Extension return full HTTP 400 and 500 status codes rather than using standard MediaWiki error pages. Finally, version 2.0 permits administrators to turn off recommended Memento headers if desired. Seeing as much of our work focuses on producing the correct revision of a wiki page in response to a user's datetime input, we also examine the problem of finding the correct revisions of the embedded resources, including images, stylesheets, and JavaScript; identifying the issues and discussing whether or not MediaWiki must be changed to support this functionality.
OS4M: Achieving Global Load Balance of MapReduce Workload by Scheduling at the Operation Level
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2014
Year: 2014

The efficiency of MapReduce is closely related to its load balance. Existing works on MapReduce load balance focus on coarse-grained scheduling. This study concerns fine-grained scheduling on MapReduce operations, with each operation representing one invocation of the Map or Reduce function. By default, MapReduce adopts the hash-based method to schedule Reduce operations, which often leads to poor load balance. In addition, the copy phase of Reduce tasks overlaps with Map tasks, which significantly hinders the progress of Map tasks due to I/O contention. Moreover, the three phases of Reduce tasks run in sequence, while consuming different resources, thereby under-utilizing resources. To overcome these problems, we introduce a set of mechanisms named OS4M (Operation Scheduling for MapReduce) to improve MapReduce's performance. OS4M achieves load balance by collecting statistics of all Map operations, and calculates a globally optimal schedule to distribute Reduce operations. With OS4M, the copy phase of Reduce tasks no longer overlaps with Map tasks, and the three phases of Reduce tasks are pipelined based on their operation loads. OS4M has been transparently incorporated into MapReduce. Evaluations on standard benchmarks show that OS4M's job duration can be shortened by up to 42%, compared with a baseline of Hadoop.
Cryptanalysis of Cryptanalysis and Improvement of Yan et al Biometric-Based Authentication Scheme for TMIS
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

Remote user authentication is critical requirement in Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS) to protect the patient personal details, security and integrity of the critical medical records of the patient as the patient data is transmitted over insecure public communication channel called Internet. In 2013, Yan proposed a biometric based remote user authentication scheme and claimed that his scheme is secure. Recently, Dheerendra et al. demonstrated some drawbacks in Yan et al scheme and proposed an improved scheme to erase the drawbacks of Yan et al scheme. We analyze Dheerendra et al scheme and identify that their scheme is vulnerable to off-line identity guessing attack, and on successfully mounting it, the attacker can perfom all major cryptographic attacks.
Design and Performance Analysis of a Non-Standard EPICS Fast Controller
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2014
Year: 2014

The large scientific projects present new technological challenges, such as the distributed control over a communication network. In particular, the middleware EPICS is the most extended communication standard in particle accelerators. The integration of modern control architectures in these EPICS networks is becoming common, as for example for the PXI/PXIe and xTCA hardware alternatives. In this work, a different integration procedure for PXIe real time controllers from National Instruments is proposed, using LabVIEW as the design tool. This methodology is considered and its performance is analyzed by means of a set of laboratory experiments. This control architecture is proposed for achieving the implementation requirements of the fast controllers, which need an important amount of computational power and signal processing capability, with a tight real-time demand. The present work studies the advantages and drawbacks of this methodology and presents its comprehensive evaluation by means of a laboratory test bench, designed for the application of systematic tests. These tests compare the proposed fast controller performance with a similar system implemented using an standard EPICS IOC provided by the CODAC system.
Impact of Exponent Parameter Value for the Partition Matrix on the Performance of Fuzzy C Means Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

Soft Clustering plays a very important rule on clustering real world data where a data item contributes to more than one cluster. Fuzzy logic based algorithms are always suitable for performing soft clustering tasks. Fuzzy C Means (FCM) algorithm is a very popular fuzzy logic based algorithm. In case of fuzzy logic based algorithm, the parameter like exponent for the partition matrix that we have to fix for the clustering task plays a very important rule on the performance of the algorithm. In this paper, an experimental analysis is done on FCM algorithm to observe the impact of this parameter on the performance of the algorithm.
Java Modular Extension for Operator Overloading
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2014
Year: 2014

The paper introduces a modular extension (plugin) for Java language compilers and Integrated Development Environments (IDE) which adds operator overloading feature to Java language while preserving backward compatibility. The extension use the idea of library-based language extensibility similar to SugarJ. But unlike most language extensions, it works directly inside the compiler and does not have any external preprocessors. This gives much faster compilation, better language compatibility and support of native developer tools (IDE, build tools). The extension plugs into javac and Eclipse Java compilers as well as in all tools whose use the compilers such as IDEs (Netbeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA), build tools (ant, maven, gradle), etc. No compiler, IDE, build tools modification needed. Just add a jar library to classpath and/or install a plugin to your IDE. The paper also discuss on how to build such Java compiler extensions. The extension source code is open on http://amelentev.github.io/java-oo/
Matching MEDLINE/PubMed Data with Web of Science (WoS): A Routine in R language
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2014
Year: 2014

We present a novel routine, namely medlineR, based on R-language, that enables the user to match data from MEDLINE/PubMed with records indexed in the ISI Web of Science (WoS) database. The matching allows exploiting the rich and controlled vocabulary of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) of MEDLINE/PubMed with additional fields of WoS. The integration provides data (e.g. citation data, list of cited reference, full list of the addresses of authors' host organisations, WoS subject categories) to perform a variety of scientometric analyses. This brief communication describes medlineR, the methodology on which it relies, and the steps the user should follow to perform the matching across the two databases. In order to specify the differences from Leydesdorff and Opthof (2013), we conclude the brief communication by testing the routine on the case of the "Burgada Syndrome".
Scaled pier fractals do not strictly self-assemble
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2014
Year: 2014

A \emph{pier fractal} is a discrete self-similar fractal whose generator contains at least one \emph{pier}, that is, a member of the generator with exactly one adjacent point. Tree fractals and pinch-point fractals are special cases of pier fractals. In this paper, we study \emph{scaled pier fractals}, where a \emph{scaled fractal} is the shape obtained by replacing each point in the original fractal by a $c \times c$ block of points, for some $c \in \mathbb{Z}^+$. We prove that no scaled discrete self-similar pier fractal strictly self-assembles, at any temperature, in Winfree's abstract Tile Assembly Model.
TCP-like molecular communications
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper, we present a communication protocol between a pair of biological nanomachines, transmitter and receiver, built upon molecular communications in an aqueous environment. In our proposal, the receiver, acting as a control node, sends a connection setup signal to the transmitter, which stokes molecules, to start molecule transmission. The molecules transmitted by the transmitter propagate in the environment and are absorbed by the receiver through its receptors. When the receiver absorbs the desired quantity of molecules, it releases a tear-down signal to notify the transmitter to stop the transmission. The proposed protocol implements a bidirectional communication by using a number of techniques originally designed for the TCP. In fact, the proposed protocol is connection-oriented, and uses the TCP-like probing to find a suitable transmission rate between transmitter and receiver so as to avoid receiver congestion. Unlike the TCP, however, explicit acknowledgments are not used, since they would degrade the communication throughput due to the large delay, a characteristic feature of molecular communications. Thus, the proposed protocol uses implicit acknowledgments, and feedback signals are sent by the receiver to throttle the transmission rate at the transmitter, i.e., explicit negative feedbacks. We also present the results of an extensive simulation campaign, used to validate the proposed protocol and to properly dimension the main protocol parameters.
Identifying roles of clinical pharmacy with survey evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

The survey data sets are important sources of data and their successful exploitation is of key importance for informed policy-decision making. We present how a survey analysis approach initially developed for customer satisfaction research in marketing can be adapted for the introduction of clinical pharmacy services into hospital. We use two analytical approaches to extract relevant managerial consequences. With OrdEval algorithm we first evaluate the importance of competences for the users of clinical pharmacy and extract their nature according to the users expectations. Next, we build a model for predicting a successful introduction of clinical pharmacy to the clinical departments. We the wards with the highest probability of successful cooperation with a clinical pharmacist. We obtain useful managerially relevant information from a relatively small sample of highly relevant respondents. We show how the OrdEval algorithm exploits the information hidden in the ordering of class and attribute values and their inherent correlation. Its output can be effectively visualized and complemented with confidence intervals.
Sparse Estimation with the Swept Approximated Message-Passing Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

Approximate Message Passing (AMP) has been shown to be a superior method for inference problems, such as the recovery of signals from sets of noisy, lower-dimensionality measurements, both in terms of reconstruction accuracy and in computational efficiency. However, AMP suffers from serious convergence issues in contexts that do not exactly match its assumptions. We propose a new approach to stabilizing AMP in these contexts by applying AMP updates to individual coefficients rather than in parallel. Our results show that this change to the AMP iteration can provide theoretically expected, but hitherto unobtainable, performance for problems on which the standard AMP iteration diverges. Additionally, we find that the computational costs of this swept coefficient update scheme is not unduly burdensome, allowing it to be applied efficiently to signals of large dimensionality.
Soccer League Optimization: A heuristic Algorithm Inspired by the Football System in European Countries
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper a new heuristic optimization algorithm has been introduced based on the performance of the major football leagues within each season in EU countries. The algorithm starts with an initial population including three different groups of teams: the wealthiest (strongest), the regular, the poorest (weakest). Each individual of population constitute a football team while each player is an indication of a player in a post. The optimization can hopefully occurs when the competition among the teams in all the leagues is imitated as the strongest teams usually purchase the best players of the regular teams and in turn, regular teams purchase the best players of the weakest who should always discover young players instead of buying professionals. It has been shown that the algorithm can hopefully converge to an acceptable solution solving various benchmarks. Key words: Heuristic Algorithms
Improving Energy Efficiency of MPTCP for Mobile Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) is a new transport protocol that enables systems to exploit available paths through multiple network interfaces. MPTCP is particularly useful for mobile devices, which usually have multiple wireless interfaces. However, these devices have limited power capacity and thus judicious use of these interfaces is required. In this work, we develop a model for MPTCP energy consumption derived from experimental measurements using MPTCP on a mobile device with both cellular and WiFi interfaces. Using our energy model, we identify an operating region where there is scope to improve power efficiency compared to both standard TCP and MPTCP. We design and implement an improved energy-efficient MPTCP, called eMPTCP. We evaluate eMPTCP on a mobile device across several scenarios, including varying bandwidth, background traffic, and user mobility. Our results show that eMPTCP can reduce the power consumption by up to 15% compared with MPTCP, while preserving the availability and robustness benefits of MPTCP. Furthermore, we show that when compared with TCP over WiFi, which is more energy efficient than TCP over LTE, eMPTCP obtains significantly better performance with relatively little additional energy overhead.
Structural index reduction algorithms for differential algebraic equations via fixed-point iteration
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2014
Year: 2014

Motivated by Pryce's structural index reduction method for differential algebraic equations (DAEs), we show the complexity of the fixed-point iteration algorithm and propose a fixed-point iteration method with parameters. It leads to a block fixed-point iteration method which can be applied to large-scale DAEs with block upper triangular structure. Moreover, its complexity analysis is also given in this paper.
A Heuristic Method to Generate Better Initial Population for Evolutionary Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2014
Year: 2014

Initial population plays an important role in heuristic algorithms such as GA as it help to decrease the time those algorithms need to achieve an acceptable result. Furthermore, it may influence the quality of the final answer given by evolutionary algorithms. In this paper, we shall introduce a heuristic method to generate a target based initial population which possess two mentioned characteristics. The efficiency of the proposed method has been shown by presenting the results of our tests on the benchmarks.
Optimal Strategy Synthesis for Request-Response Games
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2014
Year: 2014

We show the existence and effective computability of optimal winning strategies for request-response games in case the quality of a play is measured by the limit superior of the mean accumulated waiting times between requests and their responses.
Exact Decoding on Latent Variable Conditional Models is NP-Hard
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

Latent variable conditional models, including the latent conditional random fields as a special case, are popular models for many natural language processing and vision processing tasks. The computational complexity of the exact decoding/inference in latent conditional random fields is unclear. In this paper, we try to clarify the computational complexity of the exact decoding. We analyze the complexity and demonstrate that it is an NP-hard problem even on a sequential labeling setting. Furthermore, we propose the latent-dynamic inference (LDI-Naive) method and its bounded version (LDI-Bounded), which are able to perform exact-inference or almost-exact-inference by using top-$n$ search and dynamic programming.
A Fast Simulation Method for the Sum of Subexponential Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

Estimating the probability that a sum of random variables (RVs) exceeds a given threshold is a well-known challenging problem. Closed-form expression of the sum distribution is usually intractable and presents an open problem. A crude Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is the standard technique for the estimation of this type of probability. However, this approach is computationally expensive especially when dealing with rare events (i.e events with very small probabilities). Importance Sampling (IS) is an alternative approach which effectively improves the computational efficiency of the MC simulation. In this paper, we develop a general framework based on IS approach for the efficient estimation of the probability that the sum of independent and not necessarily identically distributed heavy-tailed RVs exceeds a given threshold. The proposed IS approach is based on constructing a new sampling distribution by twisting the hazard rate of the original underlying distribution of each component in the summation. A minmax approach is carried out for the determination of the twisting parameter, for any given threshold. Moreover, using this minmax optimal choice, the estimation of the probability of interest is shown to be asymptotically optimal as the threshold goes to infinity. We also offer some selected simulation results illustrating first the efficiency of the proposed IS approach compared to the naive MC simulation. The near-optimality of the minmax approach is then numerically analyzed.
The Frobenius anatomy of word meanings II: possessive relative pronouns
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2014
Year: 2014

Within the categorical compositional distributional model of meaning, we provide semantic interpretations for the subject and object roles of the possessive relative pronoun `whose'. This is done in terms of Frobenius algebras over compact closed categories. These algebras and their diagrammatic language expose how meanings of words in relative clauses interact with each other. We show how our interpretation is related to Montague-style semantics and provide a truth-theoretic interpretation. We also show how vector spaces provide a concrete interpretation and provide preliminary corpus-based experimental evidence. In a prequel to this paper, we used similar methods and dealt with the case of subject and object relative pronouns.
A Quality Framework for Agile Requirements: A Practitioner's Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

Verification activities are necessary to ensure that the requirements are specified in a correct way. However, until now requirements verification research has focused on traditional up-front requirements. Agile or just-in-time requirements are by definition incomplete, not specific and might be ambiguous when initially specified, indicating a different notion of 'correctness'. We analyze how verification of agile requirements quality should be performed, based on literature of traditional and agile requirements. This leads to an agile quality framework, instantiated for the specific requirement types of feature requests in open source projects and user stories in agile projects. We have performed an initial qualitative validation of our framework for feature requests with eight practitioners from the Dutch agile community, receiving overall positive feedback.
An algorithm for Boolean satisfiability based on generalized orthonormal expansion
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2014
Year: 2014

This paper proposes an algorithm for deciding consistency of systems of Boolean equations in several variables with co-efficients in the two element Boolean algebra $B_{0}=\{0,1\}$ and find all satisfying assignments. The algorithm is based on the application of a well known generalized Boole-Shannon orthonormal (ON) expansion of Boolean functions. A necessary and sufficient consistency condition for a special class of functions was developed in \cite{sule} using such an expansion. Paper \cite{sule} develops a condition for consistency of the equation $f(X)=0$ for the special classes of Boolean functions 1) $f$ in $B(Φ(X))$ for an ON set $Φ$ of Boolean functions in $X$ over a general Boolean algebra $B$ and 2) $f$ in $B(X_{2})(Φ(X_{1}))$. The present paper addresses the problem of obtaining the consistency conditions for arbitrary Boolean functions in $B_{0}(X)$. Next, the consistency for a single equation is shown equivalent to another system of Boolean equations which involves the ON functions and characterizes all solutions. This result is then extended for Boolean systems in several variables over the algebra $B_{0}=\{0,1\}$ which does not convert the system into a single equation. This condition leads to the algorithm for computing all solutions of the Boolean system without using analogous resolution and determine satisfiability. For special systems defined by CNF formulas this algorithm results into an extension of the DPLL algorithm in which the \emph{splitting rule} is generalized to several variables in terms of ON terms in the sense that splitting of CNF set in a single variable $x$ is equivalent to ON terms $x,x'$.